Big Bird

A biography of the novelist Harper Lee.

Lee triumphed with a novel that avoided moral complexity.Credit Illustration by Robert Risko

“Harper Lee is the moral conscience of the film,” Bennett Miller, the director of “Capote,” explains in an interview included on the movie’s DVD. “We were looking for an actor who had composure and dignity and a maturity of spirit and a morality and a sober-mindedness.” But though Miller acknowledges that “people who have those qualities tend not to go into acting, as a rule,” he fails to note that such people do not tend to swell the ranks of creative writers, either. Any viewer of Catherine Keener’s lambent performance in “Capote” is prepared to believe that she possesses all these traits, but they would not naturally recommend her for an authentic portrayal of the plain and sometimes stubborn Harper Lee, the subject of Charles J. Shields’s new biography, “Mockingbird” (Holt; $25).

During the Second World War, Lee, a student at Huntingdon College, in Montgomery, shunned the standard cardigan-and-pearls attire of the all-female institution in favor of a bomber jacket she’d been given by her brother, an Army Air Corps cadet. Her language was “salty,” and she sometimes smoked a pipe, and, while her face seems to have been pleasantly approachable, she described herself as “ugly as sin.” After she transferred to the undergraduate law program at the University of Alabama, mostly to please her father, her lack of polish struck some as ill-suited to the judicial decorum she was being trained to observe.

Growing up, she had preferred tackle to touch football, and tended to bully her friends, including the young Truman Capote, who, during the late nineteen-twenties and the thirties, was fobbed off by his feckless mother on relatives who lived in Lee’s home town, Monroeville. He put her into his fiction at least twice—as Idabel Tompkins (“I want so much to be a boy”), in “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” and as Ann (Jumbo) Finchburg, in “The Thanksgiving Visitor.” Lee did the same for him in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” turning the boy Truman into Dill, an effeminate schemer with an enormous capacity for lying. One year, Lee’s father gave her and Truman a twenty-pound Underwood typewriter, which the two children managed to shift back and forth between their houses and use in the composition of collaborative fictions about the neighbors.

In 1959, when Capote asked Lee to accompany him to Kansas while he looked into the murder of the Clutter family, he was thirty-five and already famous, a sort of self-hatched Fabergé egg—the author of high-gloss magazine journalism, some dankly suggestive Southern-gothic fiction, and the silvery “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Lee was just reaching the end of a decade-long literary struggle. After dropping out of the University of Alabama, in 1948, the year Capote published his first book, she had gone to New York to write one of her own, despite her father’s apparent belief that literary success was unlikely to favor Monroeville twice. In the city, she scrounged for change in parking meters and used an old wooden door for a writing desk. She spent most of the fifties living in Yorkville, on the Upper East Side, working as an airline ticket agent and failing to impress the other artistically ambitious Southerners she ran into. “Here was this dumpy girl from Monroeville,” one of them recalled years later. “We didn’t think she was up to much. She said she was writing a book, and that was that.”

Michael Brown, a lyricist who worked with Capote on a musical adapted from his story “House of Flowers,” became, along with his wife, Joy, a crucial friend and benefactor. In 1956, as a Christmas present, they gave Lee enough money to take a year off from her job. Brown also steered her toward the husband-and-wife agents Maurice Crain and Annie Laurie Williams, who had sold the movie rights to “Gone with the Wind.” The couple were cool to Lee’s short stories, but were willing to take a chance on a novel called, first, “Go Set a Watchman”; then, at Maurice Crain’s suggestion, “Atticus”; and, finally, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The Crains sold the book to Lippincott, and Lee was nervously awaiting the galleys when she got Capote’s call about the Clutter killings.

For much of the past forty years, ever since it began to look as if Lee would not publish a second novel, a story has persisted that it was actually Capote who wrote “To Kill a Mockingbird.” He did suggest some cuts, but extensive editorial correspondence between Lee and her agents and publishers argues for her authorship, as does Shields’s reminder of “Truman’s inability to keep anybody’s secrets.” Since the appearance of Bennett Miller’s film, however, it is Lee’s role in Capote’s work that has been the subject of literary discussion. Shields cites scholarly and hearsay evidence that Lee was angry at having her contribution to “In Cold Blood” slighted and at being made to share the book’s dedication with Capote’s lover, Jack Dunphy. Like Miller’s movie, this new biography seems to be a brief for her indispensability to Capote’s nonfiction novel. She becomes a kind of collaborator, not just someone who smoothed the author’s way among the weathered and suspicious residents of Finney County, Kansas. Capote did give Lee credit for being “extremely helpful” in “making friends with the wives of the people I wanted to meet,” but he had brought her along principally as a confirmatory pair of eyes and ears.

The hundred and fifty pages of notes she took show that she was operating in Kansas with the confidence of a soon-to-be-published writer. She was unafraid to propose to Capote a much darker view of the Clutters than the one he was beginning to set down himself. Interviews she conducted, and her inspection of the family’s house, convinced her that the Clutters’ emotional arrangements had been inhumanly rigid, enough to have turned the mother, Bonnie, into “one of the world’s most wretched women,” a nervous, medicated creature, bedridden with the sense that she had failed her go-getting husband. What Lee took to be the strange and greedy behavior of the two oldest Clutter daughters, who had moved out of the house before the murders, sealed her impression of a tight collective misery that must have rendered the existence of Nancy Clutter, the perfectionist teen-ager who was shot along with her parents and brother, an ongoing torment. How, Lee wondered in her notebook, had the girl avoided “cracking at the seams”?

Capote wasn’t having it. He might allow the two killers some psychological mystery, tilting them toward humanity here and there in the narrative, but his victims had a purely literary job to do; as Shields points out, the author required “an idealized Clutter family.” In the end, Lee’s urgings toward complication make us wonder less about why Capote resisted them than about why Lee herself, in her own single, famous book, allowed the war between good and evil to be such a simple matter.

Mr. A. C. Lee, the father of Nelle Harper Lee and the model for Atticus Finch, was never a widower raising children by himself. His wife, Frances Finch Lee, remained alive, if impaired, throughout the childhood of Nelle and her older siblings. Musical, overweight, and sometimes loudly difficult, she suggests an inversion of the birdlike, timid Bonnie Clutter. Her behavior placed a considerable strain on Nelle, who eventually, according to Shields, “wiped the slate clean of the conflict between herself and her mother” by killing off Mrs. Atticus Finch before “To Kill a Mockingbird” even begins.

Mr. Lee was a “fond and indulgent father,” who, in addition to practicing law, edited Monroeville’s local paper and served in the state legislature. He believed in segregation, low taxes, and noblesse oblige, and, as an elder of the First United Methodist Church, was prepared to scold the pastor for too much sermonizing about racial prejudice and unfair labor conditions. “Get off the ‘social justice’ and get back on the Gospel,” he ordered the Reverend Ray Whatley, in 1952. The minister was soon associated with Martin Luther King, Jr., and as the fifties wore on Mr. Lee himself became much more progressive about civil-rights issues. Ambivalent and stretchable, he seems, all in all, a more interesting figure than Atticus Finch, the plaster saint for whom he provided the mold.

In “To Kill a Mockingbird,” empathy is Atticus’s chief and much repeated prescription for all that ails us morally. “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view,” he tells his daughter, Scout. That goes for her teacher, Miss Caroline Fisher; for the head of a lynch mob; and for the man who eventually tries to kill Scout and her brother. Atticus’s speech can be as stiff as his rectitude (“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience”), and in conversation with his children he tends toward the stagey and the sententious. The novel sometimes makes up for dramatic shortcomings by squeezing yet another puff of rhetoric from its adult protagonist, who fishes for compliments (“Sometimes I think I’m a total failure as a parent”) and has a way of making forbearance itself insufferable.

The tomboyish Scout is probably a truer refraction of Harper Lee’s youth than Catherine Keener is of her early adulthood. But Scout, too, is a kind of highly constructed doll, feisty and cute on every subject from algebra to grownups (“They don’t get around to doin’ what they say they’re gonna do half the time”). In real life, children do not tell their elders “You don’t understand children much”; but Scout does.

More troublesome than the dialogue, Lee’s narrative voice is a wildly unstable compound, a forced mixture—sometimes in the same sentence—of Scout’s very young perspective and a fully adult one. Phrases like “throughout my early life” and “when we were small” serve only to jar us out of a past that we’ve already been seeing, quite clearly, through the eyes of the little girl. Information that has been established gets repeated, and the book’s sentences are occasionally so clumsy that a reader can’t visualize the action before being asked to picture its opposite: “A flash of plain fear was going out of [Atticus’s] eyes, but returned when Dill and Jem wriggled into the light.”

Indisputably, much in the novel works. Ladies with “frostings of sweat and sweet talcum” and “rain-rotted gray houses” are finely evoked, as is the way Lee’s Monroeville (called Maycomb in the novel) believes in the hereditary replication of all human gesture and behavior. But a reader cannot help feeling that he has been transported to a Booth Tarkington novel, a Southern version of “Penrod” or “Seventeen,” where summer goes by “in routine contentment,” until the author, a few chapters in, suffers a fit of high seriousness. The theme of justice descends upon the book like the opening of school. Late in 1960, in commenting on the book’s success, Flannery O’Connor declared, “It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they’re reading a child’s book.”

The novel’s courtroom drama doesn’t derive, as has often been assumed, from the nineteen-thirties case of the Scottsboro Boys. Late in the nineteen-nineties, Lee revealed to a biographer of Richard Wright that she had based the trial of Tom Robinson on the experience of Walter Lett, a Negro whose arrest for raping a white woman was reported in the Monroe Journal on November 9, 1933. Whatever the source, the novel requires Tom Robinson’s conviction as surely as the town itself does. Without it, the reader will not have the chance, like the Negroes in the courthouse balcony, to stand up and salute Atticus’s nobly futile defense.

The book never persists in ambiguity. Mr. Underwood, a man who “despises Negroes” but protects Atticus with a shotgun, is glimpsed a couple of times and then dropped. The author prefers returning to the feel-good and the improbable, such as the Ku Klux Klan story that Atticus tells his children: “They paraded by Mr. Sam Levy’s house one night, but Sam just stood on his porch and told ’em things had come to a pretty pass, he’d sold ’em the very sheets on their backs. Sam made ’em so ashamed of themselves they went away.” If it were this easy, Atticus would have won Tom Robinson’s acquittal. By the time the novel nears its conclusion and a classmate of Scout’s gives a report on how bad Hitler is, the book has begun to cherish its own goodness.

Boo Radley, the agonized recluse living just down the street from the Finches, remains hidden and tantalizing for most of the novel, almost like the authorial imagination that never quite frees itself from fine sentiment. But in the end Boo, too, is there to do good; once he’s done it, Scout takes him by the hand and leads him out of the book.

According to Shields, reviews of the novel, which came out in 1960, left Lee with feelings of “dizzying joy” and “vindication.” After selling the first few hundred thousand copies of an eventual thirty million, the book went on to win the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and to become, in Shields’s estimation, “like Catch-22, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Portnoy’s Complaint, On the Road, The Bell Jar, Soul on Ice, and The Feminine Mystique—books that seized the imagination of the post-World War II generation—a novel that figured in changing ‘the system.’ ”

But if it’s true that by 1988 the book “was taught in 74 percent of the nation’s public schools”—a statistic issued by the National Council of Teachers of English, who are apparently uninclined to make an old-fashioned fuss over the book’s dangling modifiers—it is less because the novel was likely to stimulate students toward protest than because it acted as a kind of moral Ritalin, an ungainsayable endorser of the obvious. “How can you be an Atticus?” asks one piece of curricular material to be found posted on the Web. Shields is able to cite a scholar, Claudia Durst Johnson, “who has published extensively” on this single book, which “readers in surveys rank as the most influential in their lives after the Bible.” For all that, readers returning to the book after many years may find themselves echoing the film Capote’s boozed-up muttering about “To Kill a Mockingbird”: “I frankly don’t see what all the fuss is about.”

Actually, this remark is made in connection with the 1962 movie version of the novel, a movie that, like the film adaptation of “Gone with the Wind,” is rather better than the original material. Lee’s agents handled the book with care, getting it into the sensitive hands of the director Robert Mulligan and the producer Alan J. Pakula. To play Atticus, Lee wanted Spencer Tracy and Universal wanted Rock Hudson; Bing Crosby wanted himself. The part went to Gregory Peck, an actor so closely associated with “composure and dignity and a maturity of spirit and a morality and a sober-mindedness” that, years later, “Capote” ’s Bennett Miller may have momentarily thought of him for Harper Lee.

Peck’s performance is top-heavy with a kind of civic responsibility, and a Yankee frost often kills his carefully tended Southern accent, but his Atticus is still more subtle than the book’s. Credit here must go to Horton Foote’s screenplay, which, unlike most Hollywood adaptations, tends to prune rather than gild the dialogue from its published source. In the book, Scout asks Atticus if he really is a “nigger-lover,” as she’s heard him called, and he responds, “I certainly am. I do my best to love everybody.” Foote skips this cloying exchange, and has the father explain himself with a less self-regarding line from the book: “I’m simply defending a Negro.” The same principle of selection is at work when it comes to Jem’s exasperation with his sister. Foote uses a close variant of a plain line from Lee (“I swear, Scout, you act more like a girl all the time”), rather than the archly implausible line (“You act so much like a girl it’s mortifyin’ ”) that she also makes available.

The novel is full of set pieces that provide either local color or the opportunity for some Aesopian underlining of Atticus’s rectitude. Mulligan filmed and then cut an episode in which Mrs. Dubose, a local termagant, is shown trying to free herself from a secret morphine habit before she dies. Good as the actress Ruth White’s performance of the scene was, “it stopped the film,” Pakula realized. The episode stops the novel, too, but provides Atticus with the chance to make a speech about courage (“She was the bravest person I ever knew”). Lubricated with the syrup of Elmer Bernstein’s score, the movie has a propulsion that the novel never achieves. The film even solves the book’s vocal problems, extracting bits of the adult narrative line to use, sparingly, as voice-over.

Flush with the success of “In Cold Blood,” Capote threw the famous Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel. With her new wealth from “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Lee purchased a statue of John Wesley for the First United Methodist Church of Monroeville. She had more or less ceased giving interviews by 1964, and stuck to a quiet pattern of spending part of the year in New York and part in Alabama, where even now her ninety-four-year-old sister Alice acts as gatekeeper. She has, of late, been a bit more conspicuously out and about—attending a ninetieth-birthday party for Horton Foote in New York—but the privacy of her past several decades allows Shields reasonably to argue that Capote’s public unravelling may have acted for her as a cautionary tale.

Lee has resisted biographers, including Shields, whose requests for coöperation, he says, she “declined with vigor.” A former high-school teacher who has written nonfiction books for young adults, Shields has been enterprising in the face of frustration, basing his biography “on six hundred interviews and other sorts of communication with Harper Lee’s friends, associates, and former classmates.” He offers the book as a kind of homemade present, whose “unorthodox methods” include some slightly imaginative reconstructions, at least one Internet anecdote, and a tendency to pad or wander from the subject when his material runs thin. If the biographer sometimes loses a sense of proportion, that’s understandable enough with a life as front-loaded as Lee’s.

Predictably, any number of her personal mysteries remain unsolved at the biography’s end. Did Lee have a romance with an Alabama professor? Did she have what Shields calls “a chaste affair” with Maurice Crain? Capote once hinted at something unhappy between them, and Shields is tempted to see a lack of evidence on this subject as being the evidence itself: “Among [Crain’s] papers at Columbia University, there is not a single piece of correspondence from Nelle. It’s as if the collection was scoured clean of the relationship.”

The greatest mystery, of course, is why Lee never published a second novel, and whether she even got very far in writing one. Absent some late-life efflorescence, “To Kill a Mockingbird” will be it for her, despite a once professed desire to become “the Jane Austen of south Alabama” and a claim, in the years just after the novel’s publication, to be spending between six and twelve hours a day at her desk. As time went on, her editor grew impatient, and her agents became anxious. Eventually, they stopped asking. Shields attributes to Alice the report that, sometime in the nineteen-seventies, “just as Nelle was finishing the novel, a burglar broke into her apartment and stole the manuscript.” What Lee may share most with Capote—who was forever promising and not delivering “Answered Prayers”—is a kind of flamboyant silence, the typewriter they once passed back and forth under the summer sun having become, for both of them, thirty years later, too hot not to cool down. ♦

Thomas Mallon is a novelist, essayist, and critic. His next book, “Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years,” comes out in September.